Introduction to CloudPhysics

A company’s IT Infrastructure is crucial to its survival and succes, which is why most companies invest heavily in their IT Infrastructure to reduce risk and increase performance.

Despite these investments, the complex and dynamic nature of IT Infrastructure environments means that most companies do not have a complete picture of their IT infrastructure and the workloads that run on it. There is a risk and performance penalty associated with this.

The risk lies in making changes to your largely unknown environment; like adding resources, adding workloads and changing policies. These can have unpredictable effects that jeopardize the stability of your IT Infrastructure. To mitigate this risk, companies create separate Test & Development infrastructures to test new configurations. However these are costly and time-consuming, plus some real-world scenarios cannot easily be replicated.

The performance penalty arises from the fact that an unknown IT Infrastructure can not use its resources optimally.

Enter CloudPhysics. They have developed a non-disruptive data collection technique for VMware vSphere environments where data about the IT Infrastructure and the workloads that run on it are collected.[Read more…]

CEO Series

As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.

PernixData

Storage arrays have typically been designed for Data Services and not performance. By scaling up disks inside the array, performance does increase but the supporting infrastructure quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Server side flash offers a solution by being close to the application. However because it is a single device, you loose many of the crucial advantages of virtualization like mobility (HA & DRS)[Read more…]